Since they became commonplace, free-to-play games have been criticized as unethical, greedy, manipulative, pathologically damaging…you name it. (And the more famous ones are.) It’s something that I’ve been dwelling on for months, given that for the last year and a half, my job has had me making exactly the sort of game that hits all the low notes: ( Read more... )

Jonathan Blow (Braid) and Markus “Notch” Persson (Minecraft) conspired to bring some game freakonomics to Twitter.

Take two hypothetical games. They’re identical except for how they’re supported. Game A doesn’t cost any money to play, and there’s nothing to buy within it either, but it includes ads. Game B has no ads, but you have to buy it to ( Read more... )

I take it as a given that if two people both start with the same facts and both apply proper logic, they will reach identical conclusions. So if two people disagree, then either they’re not working from the same facts or at least one of them got the logic wrong.

Or, alternately, there’s a third option: they have different goals.

It’s not rational ( Read more... )